THE DARK BRILLIANCE OF EDWARD HOPPER

^{Early Sunday Morning (1930)}       When a late spring Nor’easter clips Manhattan, fat raindrops fall onto the emerging foliage of trees in Greenwich Village. Residents turn up their coat collars against the ice storm and scurry along streets lined with the townhouses of last century, through mews of sanctuary, and across Seventh Avenue.A wind sweeps through the canyonlands of the Hudson, sending the tumbleweed of the urban landscape — subway tickets, greaseproof wrappers and the litter of incidentalism — eddying into the air in a dance of metropolitan confetti.       ^{— James Maker}Celebrated today as the foremost master of American Realism, Edward Hopper did not achieve recognition until his mid-forties.       ^{Edward Hopper, Self-Portrait, 1925—1930}His earlier paintings, inspired when studying art in Paris, were Impressionist in style but deemed too slavishly European for the popular American Nationalism art movement of the Progressive Era.When he developed his style into realism, embracing his American cultural inheritance rather than cleaving to his Francophilia and Huguenot heritage, success began to follow.A reluctant commercial illustrator by profession, Hopper and his partner, Josephine Verstille Nivison, lived on the fourth floor of 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village.They met in the summer of 1923 at an art colony in Ogunquit, Maine. She was a gifted watercolourist whose work had been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. After they married, Josephine became her husband’s amanuensis and muse, sacrificing her own creative aspirations on the altar of his career. It was an intense and tempestuous union; they were as diametrically opposed in personality as in physical attribute, and were often locked in high combat.Marrying late in life—they were both in their early forties—they did not have children primarily because, consumed by their creativity, their energies were directed into art rather than starting a family.Hopper’s paintings were their surrogate children, their ‘heirs’, and Josephine greeted a newly finished work as a mother would a newborn.Hopper was a complex man: taciturn and enigmatic, he fell into long periods of introspection. It is said he suffered bouts of depression; if true, it might explain the peripheral shadow of foreboding present in some of his paintings.An example of this is Gas.       ^{Gas (1940)}An imaginative composite inspired by a coast-to-coast road trip, we see the artificial illumination of a gas station in a rural setting as dusk approaches.The road is not straight but curved, hemmed in either side by dense trees. The eye is drawn not to the attendant but beyond the Mobil sign, towards the impenetrable greenery at the bend in the road. What lay beyond?In Western culture, woods and forests have symbolized the sylvan world of our subconscious, and so it is here. Gas is not a literal representation but rather an interpretation, in the same way that skilful recreation is to imagination.Hopper might sit at his easel for days, paralyzed by an unconquerable inertia, although contemplation is sometimes the preparative process that stirs the wellspring of creativity.Notwithstanding, he was very prolific, producing over two hundred oil paintings together with countless watercolours and etchings during the course of his life.He seldom engaged with the multicultural, teeming streets of the city around him.Hopper’s work, whose motif was often the disconnectedness of modern life, is illustrated by an artist whose own life was one of disjuncture from both his partner and his environment.This is the essence of loneliness.       ^{Nighthawks (1942)}His most emblematic and recognizable painting, Nighthawks, is a meditation on isolation.A film noir in paint capturing the mandatory blackouts in New York City, it was loosely inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and a real corner location on Greenwich Avenue.The diner is an island of refuge in the sodium-lit nigrescence of the surrounding street, where the characters are detached from the world around them. Painted shortly after the United States entered the Second World War, it reflects the prevailing mood of uncertainty.Within the diner there appears to be no personal interaction and, significantly, there is no entrance (or exit), suggesting that its occupants are hermetically marooned in their own introspection. We, the viewer, are voyeuristically stranded in the darkness of the street, with no means of interracting with the diner’s occupants.There are cityscapes and Cape Cod homes where his love of architecture and its interplay with sunlight is expressed, but Hopper‘s figurative paintings depict its characters as solitary and pensive amid an ambience of existentialist melancholia. Even where there are two characters, they are engaged in a dual solitude: one might be in contemplation, taking in the view of a window; the other is turned away, engrossed in a book.                                             A city can feel more isolating than the uninhabited prairie. Moreover, in a city it is less expected. Loneliness, which is not to be confused with solitariness, is not the fact of being physically alone; loneliness is the gulf between your interior life and the physical presence of those around you.       The time must come when this coast (Cape Cod) will be a place of resort for those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them.       ^{— Henry David Thoreau       Truro Afternoon (1936)}In 1934, Josephine came into an inheritance which they used to build a summer home in South Truro on Cape Cod. Throughout their lives, they spent four months of the year there.Then, Cape Cod was a wilder landscape of fishing communities, unmade roads and paint-peeled clapboard with little resemblance to the gentrified colony of today. Although, there existed a railroad and a station at South Truro which served the Provincetown to Boston line.New England strongly resonated with Hopper to the extent that he was uninterested in any other region of the country. Historically, it was the land of the Pilgrims whose characteristics, reserved, conservative, puritan and bearing a certitude, he strongly identified with. New England was also the cradle of American Impressionism and once the home of Thoreau, whom Hopper greatly admired. Hopper broke with American Impressionism because he was thoroughly contemporary. American Impressionism is deeply linked to nostalgia.While French Impressionism often looked forward, American Impressionists responded to the turn of the 20th-century with a complex mix of curiosity and a yearning for a simpler, pre-industrial past.The sunlit gauze of Impressionism romanticizes American history, cushioning the anxieties of early 20th-century change.The first half of that century, which is Hopper’s period, saw an extraordinary concentration of foundational shifts in technology, geopolitics and society.   The house at Cape Cod was situated on an escarpment above Fisher Beach. From the front elevation, the view was seemingly a drop from the door straight into the vast, elemental, mercurial Atlantic. If the ocean is a metaphor for time, the Hoppers were living on the kerosene-illuminated brink of eternity. Hopper painted bucolic Americana: leafy lanes and pioneer homes standing defiantly against the broad vistas of this maritime outpost; rolling hills of verdure and seagrass shores; the telegraph pole leant in yieldingness to gales at landfall. He chased the Cape Cod light.The perfect hour is when there is a certain concord of colour and radiance. The sky is clear apart from wisps of cloud—distant and austere—and the afternoon sun has lowered, toying with its setting and producing a special contrast and vividity. Then he was ready to paint.       ^{Western Motel (1957)}During the 1950s, Hopper was inspired by travel and transit. Often leaving New York, he travelled throughout the United States. Western Motel is the only of Hopper’s paintings where the human subject, sitting with poised detachment, looks directly at the viewer.The painting evokes the impermanence and liminal nature of the motels sprouting up along the country’s highways; the scale of the American West is seen through a large window similar to that of Office in a Small City (1953).Windows… windows are the physical barrier between ourselves and the world outside.But the seamless windows in Hopper’s paintings are a metaphorical motif: they separate our interior lives from the life without, contrasting into relief our seclusion. Introverted and brusque, Hopper was a consummate outsider with very few friends.       ^{Office in a Small City (1953)}Figuratively, his paintings became increasingly more stark and austere, employing fewer elements. He was simplifying his application, as a seasoned writer becomes more concise, using fewer similes and metaphors.It is possible that his late-life wayfaring was not only inspirational—although his output understandably lessened with age and ill health—but was an acknowledgement of his mortality.Travel is sometimes a displacement activity, a nomadic gasp — that if you can keep on the move, you are outpacing the melancholia pursuing you.       ^{El Palacio, (Saltillo, Mexico), 1946}Edward Hopper died on May 15th, 1967, aged 84.Josephine Nivison, the same age, survived him by almost ten months.In her last will, she bequeathed the entire joint artistic estate—including thousands of Edward Hopper’s works and her own collection of paintings and diaries—to the Whitney Museum of American Art.   She is buried alongside her husband in his hometown of Nyack, New York.edwardhopper.netEdward Hopper @ The Whitney Museum of American Art   HOME